I changed mine twice since I posted it...
First I got drag thing and once the novelty wore off and I realized I was using it like the Dock and wished it had the Dock's features... I'm back to the Dock - in it's default place no less!
And messy again! heh
I try to not fill it up too much. I think the dock looks horrible when it's so small, and I like to keep it big enough to see how many E-mails I have in Mail without going down and magnifying the icon. I use FruitMenu for the apps that I don't use frequently enough to fill up my dock with, but use frequently enough so that I don't want to have to navigate through applications folder to find them. Works for me.
It's kind of hard for me to have small icons because of my sensitive mouse, it will skip right over what I want. XD I like having larger icons anyway, they look nice and give me easier access.
My dock's status in the pic is only for show - I normally have Magnification and Hide on.
I like to keep people guessing as to what's running on my computer.
I just wish I could customize the "theme" on OSX as I can with just about any Window Manager for Linux. Yeah I know Duality and whatnot does Themes - but I mean more drastic than that.
Here's mine. I use DragThing as a launcher for most stuff, and I only keep stuff in the Dock that I really use all the time. I guess that says something about how much actual work I do on my Mac